The Investment Marketing and Innovation Awards are back to reward the hard working innovative people and companies in the investment world. The awards categories cover both marketing and proposition development, as well as direct and digital marketing. They are designed to recognise and reward creativity and innovation within the sector.

Investment Week is delighted to be hosting the 25th Fund Manager of the Year Awards on Thursday 25 June ONLINE. This year's ceremony is a key part of Investment Week's 25th anniversary celebrations in 2020 and we will be presenting awards for Outstanding Fund Manager over 25 Years and Outstanding Contribution over 25 Years on the night. A flagship event for the investment industry for a quarter of a century, the Fund Manager of the Year Awards honour fund managers and groups at the top of their game who have demonstrated consistently strong performance for investors and whom the judging panel believe have the potential to continue to outperform in the future.

The Sustainable Funds to Watch series from Investment Week allows sponsors to show-case up and coming or evolving funds and managers to some of the most influential fund selectors in the UK. Both Funds to Watch Winter and Funds to Watch Autumn are two day mixed asset class conferences taking place in London. The conferences consist of a mixture of streams including funds under £250m, boardroom sessions aimed at more established groups, and quick fire presentations offered to groups by editorial direction.
This event is invitation only.

In this exclusive magazine exploring the evolution of quality and income ETF strategies, King reveals that each ETF follows an investment strategy developed by the group's in-house research team that leverages fundamental active insights to inform the factor definitions and applies portfolio construction principles to mitigate the unintended biases.

David Cumming, Aviva Investors' chief investment officer for equities, last year witnessed turbulent times for UK equities but he remains positive about the market in which he has a personal as well as a professional stake.

The UK's largest lender said they would cancel final dividends for 2019, amid pressure from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), as well as agreeing to put no money aside for payouts in 2020 and ruling out share buybacks. The move comes after US banks were forced to cancel share buyback plans.

The hit to both stock and fund investors adds up to more than £7.5bn, with the HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays having offered prospective yields of 9%, 10.5% and 9.6% respectively.

The announcement saw the share prices of banks across the sector fall to the bottom of the FTSE 100 leaderboard. HSBC was down 9.4% as at 2pm on Wednesday, while Barclays, Standard Chartered, Lloyds and RBS were 9.3%, 8.1%, 7.6% and 5.2% lower respectively.

But Jamie Ward, manager of the £56m TM CRUX UK Core fund, said the fall in share prices was "technically driven", rather than investors deciding the news was overly negative.

Ward noted that while a number of income funds would be owners of the banks, those funds would more likely be passive funds, rather than actives "because fund managers have been quite hesitant to own banks for quite a long period of time".

"However, the passive income funds, I suspect, will have had to hold a large portion of banks and I am sure a lot of these ETFs have now been forced to sell, and it is not really clear that there is a buyer there," Ward explained.

"You add that to an already-weak market and banks are going to be weak for a few days; but I think this is probably going to be an opportunity overall."

In a note to clients, Killik & Co said the news was "clearly disappointing for shareholders", but countered that it was "the correct decision given the uncertainty surrounding the depth and duration of the economic slowdown and the impact on the banking sector".

Banks are a favourite of investors, with platform interactive investor listing HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays as three of the most-bought equities by its clients in SIPPs during the current tax year to 31 March.

The move "ticks the boxes of moral duty and an additional capacity to lend, but from an investment perspective it removes a core plank of the case for buying bank shares", said interactive investor's head of markets Richard Hunter.